A team of Chinese physicists
are performing some serious experiments and making a lot of advancement in the
field of quantum mechanics. This team recently has tried to measure the speed
of quantum entanglement- more demonstratively known as “spooky action at a
distance”, as Einstein called it. The easy and technical
definition of Quantum Entanglement could be: “Quantum entanglement arises when
particles such as electrons, photons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and
more likely even small diamonds interact physically and then become
unconnected; the type of contact is such that each resultant member of a pair
of particles is accurately designated by the same quantum mechanical state,
which is unfixed in terms of important factors such as polarization, spin,
momentum, position, etc.”

Information in quantum
entanglement transfers very fast and when most people describe this fascinating
process, they’ll describe the information transfer as ‘instantaneous’ or
‘near-instantaneous’ (still having problem in understanding Quantum
Entanglement then please read this article). Numerous research teams have tried
to measure the definite speed seen in the transfer of information in entangled
systems, but have failed, and the reasons of failure were mostly flawed
methodology dealing in quantum nonlocality.

People mostly ask if this
process violates relativity, of course, this violates relativity because
nothing can travel faster than light. A lot of work is being done in this field
and a growing number of physicists believe we’ll achieve faster-than-light
communication by cleverly using quantum entanglement to our advantage. Now getting back to Chinese
team, the Chinese physicists entangled pairs of photons, in order to get this
measurement, then they transferred half of the pair to receiving units, named
Alice and Bob. These receiving units, were placed 15.3 km apart in an east-west
orientation – the receivers were oriented in this fashion to minimize
intervention from Earth’s rotation, which is an important issue at this scale.
The team then observed the first half of the entangled pair and waited to see
how quickly the other half assumed the same state. They repeated this process
for over 12 hours to help ensure accuracy of their measurements.

The team came back and said
that quantum entanglement transfers information at around 3-trillion meters per
second or in other words you can say four orders of magnitude faster than
light. We cannot deny one fact at the moment that our technology and
methodologies aren’t sensitive enough to measure speeds at this scale.